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Iceberg as a Metaphor for Inaction

NASASatellite images of the Petermann Glacier before (left) and after an ice island broke off.

Last week a vast block of ice broke off from the Greenland ice sheet, creating the largest iceberg to form off the country in nearly 50 years.

On Saturday, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachussets, and chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, used the unusual event to fire a salvo at Republican opponents of climate change legislation in the Senate.

Andreas Muenchow,
University of DelawareScientists are divided over whether a new “ice island” off Greenland can be attributed to global warming.

“An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Mr. Markey said in a statement. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree Arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.”

Greenland as a whole is rapidly warming, and its vast ice sheet has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice over the last decade, studies show.

And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2010 is on its way to becoming the hottest year in the modern instrument record.

But scientists are divided over whether the formation of the new “ice island” should be directly attributed to global warming, as Andy Revkin reports at the Dot Earth blog.

Jason E. Box, a glacier and climate researcher at Ohio State University, called the event, along with record low sea ice levels in the Arctic and the overall ice loss from Greenland, “all part of a climate warming pattern,” in an e-mail to Dot Earth.

Yet another glacier specialist studying the area where the iceberg formed suggested that more research was needed before the event could be attributed to recent warming of the climate, as opposed to long-term natural variations.

“Global warming and climate change are very real and challenging problems, but it is foolish to assign every “visible” event to that catch-all phrase,” Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware, wrote in response to an e-mail query from Dot Earth. “It cheapens and discredits those findings where global warming is a real and immediate cause for observable phenomena. Details matter, in science as well as in policy.”

Despite the scientific uncertainty, Mr. Markey used the image of the ice island as a metaphor for the logjam of Republican opposition to climate change legislation in the Senate.

“Last summer, the House passed landmark legislation to create clean energy jobs that cut carbon pollution,” Mr. Markey said. “However, it’s still unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the U.S. Senate who continue to hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage.”

The House of Representatives passed a carbon cap-and-trade and clean energy bill by a narrow margin in 2009. But a similar measure was stymied by the threat of filibuster in the Senate, where Republicans control 41 seats, enough to prevent Democrats from ending debate on a bill and bringing it to the floor for a vote.

Unified opposition by Republicans, and clear signals by several conservative-leaning Democrats that they would not oppose a G.O.P. filibuster, led the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to abandon cap-and-trade earlier this summer, in favor of a vastly scaled-back energy bill dealing largely with oil industry regulation and energy efficiency.

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How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.